Enlarge / Teams is being decoupled from the other Office apps worldwide, six months after Microsoft did the same thing for the EU. (credit: Microsoft/Andrew Cunningham)

Months after unbundling the apps in the European Union, Microsoft is taking the Office and Teams breakup worldwide. Reuters reports that Microsoft will begin selling Teams and the other Microsoft 365 apps to new commercial customers as separate products with separate price tags beginning today.

This is a win for other team communication apps like Slack and videoconferencing apps like Zoom, both of which predate Teams but haven't had the benefits of the Office apps' huge established user base.

The separation follows an EU regulatory investigation that started in July of 2023 , almost exactly three years after Slack initially filed a complaint alleging that Microsoft was "abusing its market dominance to extinguish competition in breach of European Union competition law."

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Last week , Microsoft announced that it would soon begin offering previews of Microsoft Office 2024, the next standalone perpetually licensed version of the Office suite. Like Office 2021 before it, Office 2024 will be part of Microsoft's Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC), which is intended for IT administrators and users who value stability and predictability over constant iteration.

But Microsoft is being clearer than ever that it would really like people to move to using Microsoft 365 subscriptions, referring to Office 2024 as "a specialty product that Microsoft has committed to maintaining for use in exceptional circumstances." The company will be increasing prices for businesses by "up to 10 percent" compared to Office 2021, a price hike that Microsoft says will "support continued innovation in this niche space." Pricing for the consumer version of Office 2024 should stay the same as it is for Office 2021.

Office 2024 will receive support and security updates for five years from its release date, which will be "later this year," along with a new LTSC release of Windows 11. The company has also committed to releasing at least one more standalone version of Office in the future. If you bought Office 2021 and you're still happy with it, you'll still get support (including security updates) until October of 2026. Support for Office 2019 ended in October 2023.

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It seems like AI large language models (LLMs) are everywhere these days due to the rise of ChatGPT . Now, a software developer named Ishan Anand has managed to cram a precursor to ChatGPT called GPT-2—originally released in 2019 after some trepidation from OpenAI—into a working Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. It's freely available and is designed to educate people about how LLMs work.

"By using a spreadsheet anyone (even non-developers) can explore and play directly with how a 'real' transformer works under the hood with minimal abstractions to get in the way," writes Anand on the official website for the sheet, which he calls "Spreadsheets-are-all-you-need." It's a nod to the 2017 research paper " Attention is All You Need " that first described the Transformer architecture that has been foundational to how LLMs work.

Anand packed GPT-2 into an XLSB Microsoft Excel binary file format, and it requires the latest version of Excel to run (but won't work on the web version). It's completely local and doesn't do any API calls to cloud AI services.

Enlarge / If this kind of thing raises your eyebrows, there's a whole lot more inside a ribbon bar for you. (credit: Anaconda)

If you’re decent in Python (or aspire to be) but don’t have the chops for advanced data work in Excel, Microsoft now offers the kind of peanut butter-and-chocolate combination that you may consider a gift. At least until it goes behind the paywall.

Microsoft's Stefan Kinnestrand, writing about “the best of both worlds for data analysis and visualization,” writes that this public preview of Python in Excel will allow spreadsheet tinkerers to “manipulate and explore data in Excel using Python plots and libraries and then use Excel's formulas, charts, and PivotTables to further refine your insights.”

Microsoft partnered with Python analytics repository Anaconda to bring libraries like Pandas, Statsmodels, and Matplotlib into Excel. Python in Excel runs on Microsoft’s cloud servers, and the company is touting the security that should offer . Python runs in isolated containers, with no access to devices, your network, or user tokens, Microsoft states. Python and Excel can only really talk to each other through limited functions—xl() and =PY()—that can only return code results, not macros, VBA code, or other data, Microsoft claims.

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European Union regulators have opened a formal investigation into claims that Microsoft is unfairly bundling its Teams video conferencing app with its popular Office software as Brussels intensifies its scrutiny of big technology groups.

The European Commission, the executive body of the EU, said on Thursday that it feared Microsoft “may be abusing and defending” its market dominance in productivity software “by restricting competition.”

It was concerned the US tech giant may grant Teams “distribution advantages by not giving customers the choice” over access to the product, the statement said.

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A few months ago, Microsoft previewed Microsoft 365 Copilot , a new service that promised to integrate generative AI features into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and the other productivity apps formerly known as Microsoft Office . Among other things, Copilot promises to automate the creation of documents and emails, summarize meeting notes, and assist in the analysis of Excel data.

Microsoft has just announced pricing for the Copilot features, and it isn't cheap. Copilot will cost an extra $30 per user per month on top of whatever your business is already paying for Microsoft 365—in many cases, this will double or even triple your monthly costs. Copilot can be added to Microsoft 365 Business Standard or Premium ($12.50 and $22 per user per month, respectively) or to Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 accounts for enterprises ($36 or $57 per user per month). It can't be added to the cheaper Microsoft 365 Business Basic plan or to any home plans.

The relatively high cost is likely related to the high server costs for running these kinds of generative AI models. Copilot also draws context from the other emails, documents, and other files in your business's Microsoft 365 cloud, so each business that Microsoft supports will have a slightly different data set that it will need to be able to draw from.

Enlarge / Microsoft's new "Aptos" font family. (credit: Microsoft)

Two years ago, Microsoft announced its plans to move away from using Calibri as the default typeface for Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, and the other apps in the suite formerly known as Microsoft Office . The company introduced five candidates for replacement fonts, and a winner has emerged : a font family called Aptos, formerly known as Bierstadt.

Microsoft has never laid out in so many words why it feels it needs to move away from Calibri, though today's announcement implies that Aptos was made with high-resolution, high-density displays in mind. Calibri replaced Times New Roman as the suite's default font in Office 2007, at a time before "Retina" displays and when 1024×768 and 1280×800 screens were still the norm —a ClearType font , Calibri itself was a response to the shift from CRT to LCD screens.

Aptos was created by Steve Matteson, who is also responsible for Windows 3.1's original TrueType fonts (including Times New Roman, Arial, and Courier New) as well as Segoe , which has been Windows' default system font since Vista and is also used for Microsoft's current logo. Given Matteson's history with Microsoft, choosing Aptos over the others feels like the safest possible choice.

Enlarge / An AI-generated illustration of a GPT-powered robot worker. (credit: Ars Technica)

On Monday, Microsoft bundled ChatGPT-style AI technology into its Power Platform developer tool and Dynamics 365, Reuters reports . Affected tools include Power Virtual Agent and AI Builder, both of which have been updated to include GPT large language model (LLM) technology created by OpenAI.

The move follows the trend among tech giants such as Alphabet and Baidu to incorporate generative AI technology into their offerings—and of course, the multi-billion dollar partnership between OpenAI and Microsoft announced in January.

Microsoft's Power Platform is a development tool that allows the creation of apps with minimal coding. Its updated Power Virtual Agent allows businesses to point an AI bot at a company website or knowledge base and then ask it questions, which it calls Conversation Booster . "With the conversation booster feature, you can use the data source that holds your single source of truth across many channels through the chat experience, and the bot responses are filtered and moderated to adhere to Microsoft’s responsible AI principles," writes Microsoft in a blog post.

Enlarge / APT37, a group believed to be backed by the North Korean government, has found success exploiting the bits of Internet Explorer still present in various Windows-based apps. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Microsoft's Edge browser has replaced Internet Explorer in almost every regard, but some exceptions remain. One of those, deep inside Microsoft Word, was exploited by a North-Korean-backed group this fall, Google security researchers claim.

It's not the first time the government-backed APT37 has utilized Internet Explorer's lingering presence, as Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) notes in a blog post . APT37 has had repeated success targeting South Korean journalists and activists, plus North Korean defectors, through a limited but still successful Internet Explorer pathway.

The last exploit targeted those heading to Daily NK , a South Korean site dedicated to North Korean news. This one involved the Halloween crowd crush in Itaewon , which killed at least 151 people. A Microsoft Word .docx document, named as if it were timed and dated less than two days after the incident and labeled "accident response situation," started circulating. South Korean users began submitting the document to the Google-owned VirusTotal, where it was flagged with CVE-2017-0199 , a long-known vulnerability in Word and WordPad.